Breakfast on the Trail with Frank Hamilton Cushing

A while back Steve said we should do more food-blogging, doubtless inspired by the good things our blog-sister Roseann Hanson puts up at Three Martini Lunch. So I wanted to pull my weight in that regard, though not to short myself, a few weeks ago I did post a coot recipe that Rebecca O'Connor told me she almost had to use.

So the inspiration for this food post comes from Frank Hamilton Cushing, an ethnologist from the Smithsonian Institution who lived and studied the Indians at Zuni pueblo in western New Mexico from 1879 - 1884. This book is a collection of his writings from which the photo above of Cushing in full Zuni regalia and the account below is taken.

This comes from the story of a road-trip Cushing took with two of his Zuni compadres, Pa-lo-wah-ti-wa and Kesh-pa-he. They were going on a journey of several days on horse-back and Cushing was taken aback that they were taking essentially no supplies: a couple of small bags of cornmeal, some corn-bread, salt, pepper and their cooking utensils. Cushing was told that they would show him how to live off the land.

On their stop for the first night, Cushing's friends quickly caught a couple of rabbits that they roasted on sticks before their campfire. They also made what we called "stick bread" in Boy Scouts, a rolled-out coil of dough, draped around a stick and toasted before the fire.

The next morning, Cushing (his friends called him "Little Brother") and the Zunis get ready for breakfast. I'll let him tell the story:


…Kesh-pa-he appeared, leading the horses.

"There’s a nest just outside of camp!” said he.

“Where?” exclaimed Pa-lo-wah-ti-wa, catching up his hunting knife and cutting a twig like the one with which the rabbits had been captured the evening before. “I’ve been telling Little Brother how hunters make 'rat-brine,'” said he, with a grin, and a stirring motion of the knife he was whittling with. “He is so hungry for some that his breath is hot and his eyes moist with anxiety! – look at him!"

Thereupon both rushed to find the nest in question. It was composed of sticks, stalks, and abundant cactus spines – with which the Southwestern wood-rats cleverly protect the approaches to their houses – all piled compactly about the roots of a large juniper tree. With a prod all this was soon demolished, and the holes in one of the roots examined.

“They’re in!” called out Kesh-pa-he excitedly, and forthwith the flexible sapling probe was introduced, twirled a few times and withdrawn, two squirming, staring-eyed rats well twisted to its end, and another prodding brought out one more. The rats were choked en route to our camp, and perhaps a little too soon for their own comfort, thrown into a bed of embers, where, after roasting a few moments, they bloated up into oblong balls, became divested of their tails, legs, ears, winkers, and all other irregularities, and when pulled from the fire, looked like roasted potatoes overdone. They were “shucked” in a twinkling – came out clean and white except for a greenish tendency of what were once their under-sides – and were forthwith mashed into a pulp between two stones – meat, bones, visceral contents and all, and stirred into about a pint of salt and water. Thus concocted was the “rat-brine;” green in color, semi-fluid, and meaty in taste – for they made me eat some of it, I do not regret to say – and very aromatic in flavor; a quality which the rats derive from the trees in which they live and on the berries and leaves of which they feed. Disgusting indeed would this delicacy of the hunter be, were the wood-rat of the Southwest anything like his various Eastern representatives and cogeners; but he is not. He lives on but one or two kinds of food all his life, and the peculiar flavor of the sauce made from him is due to the way in which – visceral contents and all – he is worked up into “rat-brine.”


Bon apetit!